DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 123

obvious example of how the old world responded. As the world jumped into the age of
tourism, the French modernized the Orly airport south of Paris, built in 1932, and then in
1974 added the enormous Charles de Gaulle Airport to the east of Paris, giving Air France
its own terminal.
It wasn't obvious why Dubai needed an airport. No one had heard of it and there was
nothing to do there, no cultural sites to see, no reason to spend the night, much less a week
on vacation. The sheikh went ahead anyway and built an airfield and terminal following
the now-tired principle of “build it and they will come.” He pursued an “open skies” policy
of basically unrestricted landing rights in Dubai in order to attract business from near and
far. And he raised the ante by stocking the airline terminal with the region's first duty-free
shopping, a move that helped make the place profitable from the start and somehow fit-
ting for the emirate with an outsize reputation as a pirate's haven. The emirate was still
under nominal British rule, and these old colonial masters weren't thrilled with the idea
of a new airfield. The sheikh was undeterred. At first, the new “international” Dubai air-
port depended on flights from the regional Gulf Air, and planes from other companies
that stopped off for refueling. Once that airport was built, people did spend time in Dubai,
mostly traders or diplomats, and they needed a hotel. None existed.
The sheikh pushed and an Airlines Hotel was built near the airport in 1960. By the end
of the decade the Carlton Tower and the Ambassador Hotel had risen near the airport to
lodge people on layovers and guests of locals. Dubai was ready to proclaim itself a “tourist
destination” and in the 1970s to sell its beaches and balmy weather—the Miami or the
Mediterranean of the Middle East. The large chain hotels took the bait. Sheraton and the
Intercontinental built five-star hotels, and European sunbathers showed up for winter hol-
idays on the sand and warm waters of the Persian Gulf, with palm trees and camels as
backdrop.
Spreading travel and tourism beyond Europe and North America was tricky, requiring
a pioneer spirit. Ed Fuller, the president and managing director of international lodging
at Marriott International, told me that hotels followed airplanes. He helped mastermind
Marriott's expansion overseas, especially in the Middle East, and is an informal historian
of tourism. “To win landing rights in many countries, airlines had to promise that hotels
would be built for the people who came on those airplanes. That's one of the reasons
Hilton became an international company.”
The ball was rolling. Completion of the Dubai airport led to hotels that led to more
new airlines using the airport and then more new hotels for the tourists they brought in.
By the end of the 1970s, Dubai's airport actually looked international, with the now-de-
funct British airline BOAC and the German carrier Lufthansa leading the way. By the
1980s over forty airlines were flying into Dubai. In the meantime, Dubai became inde-
pendent from Great Britain and joined with neighboring emirates to create the UAE in
1971. About ten years later, as they were sorting out their future prospects, several of these